In existing guided search systems, a user typically inputs at a client some text as a query to obtain information related to the input text. After obtaining the text provided from the client, a guided search server analyzes the text, identifies a query intention of the user, provides the client with the information related to the text input by the user, and narrows a query scope of the user to enable the user to retrieve information that he requires.
Currently, the guided search server generally pre-stores a mapping table of mapping relationships between query information and guidance information. For example, the query information is the text that the user inputs at the client and the guidance information is the information related to the text that the user inputs. After obtaining query information, the guided search server searches the mapping table for guidance information corresponding to the query information and transmits the retrieved guidance information corresponding to the query information to the client if the guidance information is retrieved from the mapping table.
In existing guided search systems, the guided search server typically retrieves the guidance information corresponding to the query information that the user inputs from the mapping table and transmits the retrieved guidance information to the client only if the query information that the user inputs completely matches with the query information in the mapping table. If the query information that the user inputs is not consistent with any query information in the mapping table, then the guided search server typically cannot retrieve any guidance information corresponding to the query information that the user inputs from the mapping table. Consequently, in the existing guided search, the guided search server typically cannot provide the client with any guidance information corresponding to query information that is absent in the mapping table.